Ultraportable Notebook Roundup -- Four Featherweights Reviewed

Ultraportable vs. Netbook

Despite the merits of an ultraportable notebook as a serious productivity tool, there will no doubt be folks still intent on getting a netbook for their all-purpose computing needs—the prospect of a four-fold cost savings can lead to all manner of crazy thinking.

To make the comparison a little more vivid, we looked at how our current favorite netbook—the $400 Asus Eee 1000HE (reviewed in June)—holds up to the ultraportables in this roundup. The benchmarks alone are pretty damning. While the best ultraportables took a little more than 30 minutes to create a slide show using ProShow, the 1000HE took nearly two and a half hours! Similarly, the 1000HE was two to three times slower than the ultraportables at running our Photoshop script. And while we’re impressed that the netbook could achieve 58fps in Quake 3, that’s not even close to the performance of its ultraportable brethren.

What this all means in real-world terms is that you’ll be doing a lot more waiting and a lot less working if you follow the dough. And that’s not even taking into account usability issues such as the keyboard, touch pad, and screen real-estate—which are all noticeably smaller on the 1000HE and sure to hold you back to some degree. Shoot, the 1000HE might offer superior battery life, but you’ll need every minute of that gain just to bridge the productivity gap, essentially cancelling out the benefit.

There are just no two ways around it: While a netbook might be fine for futzing around on the net and sending emails, it’s not the right tool for regular and varied computing.